The Strange Adventures of Mr. John Smith in Paris/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
MEANWHILE, Mr. John Smith was having troubles of his own, and rather enjoying them. He was sitting in a small office of the prefecture of police—police headquarters in Passaic—on the Ile de la Cite, facing M. Baudet, a grim visaged man of middle age who perfumed his whisker and smoked vile cigarettes. Mr. Smith wondered if he perfumed his whiskers to kill the odor of the cigarettes, or if he smoked the cigarettes to kill the odor of his whiskers. M. Remi was there, along with two or three other French sleuths, who glowered at Mr. Smith individually and collectively and babbled incomprehensible asides. Mr. Smith stood it for a long time: then, to M. Baudet, who seemed to be the chief:
“Well, Cap, you got me,” he remarked pleasantly. “Now would you mind telling me what it’s all about?”
Evidently this was what they had been waiting for, the prisoner to break the silence. M. Baudet stabbed him with a glance of his piercing eyes and remained silent. It was a highly effective method of his own, this silence, to reduce a man to fear and awe in the beginning. It sapped his courage and left him weak and flabby.
“If you’re going to ask any questions, begin,” Mr. Smith requested.
“I shall ask the questions, Monsieur, at the proper time.” M. Baudet’s tone was cold, incisive, steely.
“And all I have to do is to answer ’em?”
“That is all, Monsieur.”
WELL, son, we’ll better understand each other in the beginning,” Mr. Smith remarked easily. “If you don’t answer some of my questions right now, I don’t answer any of yours. In other words, it you hold me here without telling me why, I’ll get a man down here from the American Embassy and let out a scream they’ll hear all the way to Washington. In the first place, I want to know why I was pinched.”
There was a note of calm assurance in Mr. Smith’s voice, utter composure in the powerful hands which lay idly on the arms of his chair. His straight staring eyes were fixed squarely upon those of M. Baudet.
“Understand me. I’m not going to start any roughhouse or anything; but you’ve got to tell me why I’m here,” he concluded.
“You shall answer my questions, Monsieur!” A slender, manicured hand, delicate as a woman’s, tugged complacently at the perfumed beard; there was a merciless glitter in the eyes above it. “You are W. Mandeville Clarke!”
“Well, suppose I am?” queried Mr. Smith. “What has he done? Is there an order for his arrest from the United States?”
“Ah! You do not deny it! So you are M. Mandeville Clarke, alias John Smith, alias Watts Ittooyu!”
“I’m not denying anything,” Mr. Smith returned placidly. “If I’m Clarke, what have I done? Have I murdered somebody, or wrecked a train, or burned a barn, or robbed a safe?”
“You admit that you are Clarke?”
“I’m not denying it, am I? I want to know why I’m here. What’s Clarke done?”
It was most disconcerting, really, quite unprisonerlike! M. Baudet had anticipated denial. This man denied nothing—merely wanted to know. That precipitated an embarrassing situation. Why had Clarke been arrested? Why was he being held?
YOUR arrest was necessary. Monsieur.” And he hoped Mr. Smith would read, some deep, underlying threat in the words.
“Why?” Mr. Smith bellowed at him suddenly, belligerently. “Who ordered it? Have I committed a crime in Paris? If not, then the order for an arrest came from the United States. Who ordered it?”
M. Baudet blinked a little, and a long silence fell. These burly Americans! What monstrous voices they had. to be sure! And how evil they could look about the eyes! Alter a little M. Baudet glanced at M. Remi blankly.
“Tell it to me now: I want to know.” Mr. Smith insisted in a voice as if he was rooting for the home team. “You can’t hold me here forever without telling me why, and if you don’t tell me you’ve got to tell the American Ambassador!”
There was a little nervous twitch in M. Baudet’s delicate hand as he tugged at the perfumed whiskers again. Here was a situation unprecedented, an American, a pig of an American, without hope or honor in his soul, bawling at him. M. Baudet, as if he was a stevedore! When he spoke his own voice was like velvet.
“We knew you to be M. Clarke almost from the first,” he said, and as he went on the velvety purr merged into frigid dramatics. “For instance, in introducing yourself at the Maison de Treville, you wrote your name, W. Mandeville Clarke, on a slip of paper: then, realizing your error, destroyed it. Here are those bits of paper, Monsieur.”
He produced them. Mr. Smith stared.
“When one of my men met you on the Pont du Carrousel the following morning and asked your name, you hesitated before you answered. The assumed name of John Smith did not spring into your mind as readily as would have your own. It is an infallible test! Again, when another of my men accosted you in the Place de l’Opéra and asked the same questions, you gave a different name. In other words, Monsieur, when taken unawares you forgot the name you had assumed, and, realizing only the necessity of giving some name other than your own, you gave the name Watts Ittooyu. and your address as the corner of the United States and two o’clock. I have the direct information. Monsieur, that there is no such address; therefore you are Clarke.”
THERE it was, all of it, as clear as mud! Mr. Smith didn’t smile, because the one question to which he had been seeking an answer was not answered. He returned to it unwaveringly.
“Was there an order from the United States to arrest Clarke?”
“Well, Monsieur, the fact is,” and M. Baudet hesitated a little, “the fact is our instructions from the United States were not so complete as we should have wished: so—”
“Was there an order from the United States to arrest Clarke?”
“Well, there was no direct order; but—”
Mr. Smith drew a long breath, a very long breath. “But you did have a request from some one, possibly a private detective agency, to keep a lookout for Clarke?” he continued. “And a description of Clarke?”
“That is true, Monsieur: but you must understand—”
“Now,” Mr. Smith interrupted abruptly, “you yourself say you had no order to arrest Clarke. Your men had evidently been watching me pretty closely since I have been in Paris. Have I committed any crime here?”
“You went on and on endlessly in the farce of searching for yourself, Monsieur. We knew you were Clarke, and it was necessary to bring the matter to a conclusion. So you were arrested. I shall notify the agency in New York immediately, and—”
“No charge against me in the United States, not even a charge against me in Paris, and still you pinched me!”
M. Remi leaned forward suddenly and mysteriously whispered into the pearl-like ear of his chief, whereupon a glad smile split the perfumed whiskers, and the piercing eyes grew cunning.
“If you are thinking you are to be freed immediately. Monsieur, you are mistaken,” M. Baudet remarked suavely. “There is a charge against you in Paris, and even your American Ambassador cannot aid you until that charge is disposed of. That is that you have violated our laws by living here under an assumed name and in disguise!”
THEN Mr. Smith smiled. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his sturdy American legs, and continued to smile. Away back of that smile was the consciousness that Clarke’s perfidy had not been discovered in the bank; that it had not been reported to the police; that the supposed package of United States bonds in the vault was still unbroken; and that so long as those things were true, he, Mr. John Smith, was not only in no danger himself, but was at liberty to pursue the task he had set himself, of finding and returning those bonds. If their loss was discovered, it meant the collapse of the bank, inevitably.
“Well, Cap,” and Mr. Smith was purring like a tickled kitten. “I’ll just bet you ten dollars to the hole in a pretzel that I am not in Paris under an assumed name, nor am I disguised! Sad as it may seem, this is my own face.”
“Not disguised!” exclaimed M. Baudet. “Not under an assumed name! But you are M. Clarke!”
“Who told you so?”
“You did, Monsieur.”
“Wrong, Cap. I merely didn’t say I wasn’t Clarke. You must have a pretty accurate description of Clarke. He’s a man about my size?”
“Just your size, Monsieur.”
“With gray hair?”
“You have dyed it, Monsieur. It has that dingy look of dyed hair.”
“Thanks! If you know of anything that will take the dye off, get busy. Your description probably said too that Mr. Clarke has a full, square cut beard?”
“A razor, Monsieur.” M. Baudet smiled.
“But your description did say a gray beard?”
“Yes, gray, almost white.”
“Well, take it from me. I’m not Clarke. All you’ve got to do to convince yourself is to sit right still there for the next ten hours and watch my whiskers grow. They’ll come out black.”
There was silence, dead silence, a silence fraught with tragedy. After a long time M. Baudet turned upon M. Remi with a sinister glare in his eye.
“If that is true, M. Remi,” he said measuredly, “it is evident that you have made the mistake.”
M. Remi bowed his head in shame and sorrow; then another idea came. He spoke aside to his chief, who in turn addressed Mr. Smith.
“Your name is John Smith, then?”
“John Smith, of Passaic, New Jersey.”
“You have been looking for M. Clarke, too. Who are you? Why have you been searching?”
“Because I wanted to find him,” replied Mr. Smith. “Now you fly cops in Paris are pretty nifty, Cap. Can’t you imagine why I came all the way from the United States to find Clarke, the same man you are after? Doesn’t it suggest anything to you?”
Gradually a light of understanding grew in M. Baudet’s eyes, and for a second time the perfumed whiskers parted in a smile. “Perhaps,” it came in a thrilling whisper, “perhaps you too are a detective!”
“Ah!” It was most noncommittal. Mr. Smith rose and stretched his long legs. “There is the native shrewdness of France, Monsieur!”
They shook hands.
Late that night Mr. Smith returned to his room in the Maison de Treville with an odd smile of satisfaction on his face.
ON the following afternoon five men met with W. Mandeville Clarke in the shabby little apartment in the Rue St. Honore, and important business papers, involving millions, were signed. By the terms of the deal Clarke was temporarily to hypothecate United States bonds valued at one and a half million dollars. Smiling triumphantly, he opened the little leather bag.
It was empty!