CHAPTER VI
NINETEEN MINUTES PAST SEVEN
Patrice, in his bedroom at the home, was unable to sleep that night. Hehad a continual waking sensation of being oppressed and hunted down, asthough he were suffering the terrors of some monstrous nightmare. He hadan impression that the frantic series of events in which he was playingthe combined parts of a bewildered spectator and a helpless actor wouldnever cease so long as he tried to rest; that, on the contrary, theywould rage with greater violence and intensity. The leave-taking of thehusband and wife did not put an end, even momentarily, to the dangersincurred by Coralie. Fresh perils arose on every side; and PatriceBelval confessed himself incapable of foreseeing and still more ofallaying them.
After lying awake for two hours, he switched on his electric light andbegan hurriedly to write down the story of the past twelve hours. Hehoped in this way to some small extent to unravel the tangled knot.
At six o'clock he went and roused Ya-Bon and brought him back with him.Then, standing in front of the astonished negro, he crossed his arms andexclaimed:
"So you consider that your job is over! While I lie tossing about in thedark, my lord sleeps and all's well! My dear man, you have a jollyelastic conscience."
The word elastic amused the Senegalese mightily. His mouth opened widerthan ever; and he gave a grunt of enjoyment.
"That'll do, that'll do," said the captain. "There's no getting a wordin, once you start talking. Here, take a chair, read this report andgive me your reasoned opinion. What? You don't know how to read? Well,upon my word! What was the good, then, of wearing out the seat of yourtrousers on the benches of the Senegal schools and colleges? A queereducation, I must say!"
He heaved a sigh, and, snatching the manuscript, said:
"Listen, reflect, argue, deduct and conclude. This is how the matterbriefly stands. First, we have one Essares Bey, a banker, rich asCroesus, and the lowest of rapscallions, who betrays at one and the sametime France, Egypt, England, Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece . . . as isproved by the fact that his accomplices roast his feet for him.Thereupon he kills one of them and gets rid of four with the aid of asmany millions, which millions he orders another accomplice to get backfor him before five minutes are passed. And all these bright spiritswill duck underground at eleven o'clock this morning, for at twelveo'clock the police propose to enter on the scene. Good."
Patrice Belval paused to take breath and continued:
"Secondly, Little Mother Coralie--upon my word, I can't say why--ismarried to Rapscallion Bey. She hates him and wants to kill him. Heloves her and wants to kill her. There is also a colonel who loves herand for that reason loses his life and a certain Mustapha, who tries tokidnap her on the colonel's account and also loses his life for thatreason, strangled by a Senegalese. Lastly, there is a French captain, adot-and-carry-one, who likewise loves her, but whom she avoids becauseshe is married to a man whom she abhors. And with this captain, in aprevious incarnation, she has halved an amethyst bead. Add to all this,by way of accessories, a rusty key, a red silk bowstring, a dog chokedto death and a grate filled with red coals. And, if you dare tounderstand a single word of my explanation, I'll catch you a whack withmy wooden leg, for I don't understand it a little bit and I'm yourcaptain."
Ya-Bon laughed all over his mouth and all over the gaping scar that cutone of his cheeks in two. As ordered by his captain, he understoodnothing of the business and very little of what Patrice had said; but healways quivered with delight when Patrice addressed him in that grufftone.
"That's enough," said the captain. "It's my turn now to argue, deductand conclude."
He leant against the mantelpiece, with his two elbows on the marbleshelf and his head tight-pressed between his hands. His merriment, whichsprang from temperamental lightness of heart, was this time only asurface merriment. Deep down within himself he did nothing but think ofCoralie with sorrowful apprehension. What could he do to protect her? Anumber of plans occurred to him: which was he to choose? Should he huntthrough the numbers in the telephone-book till he hit upon thewhereabouts of that Gregoire, with whom Bournef and his companions hadtaken refuge? Should he inform the police? Should he return to the RueRaynouard? He did not know. Yes, he was capable of acting, if the act tobe performed consisted in flinging himself into the conflict withfurious ardor. But to prepare the action, to divine the obstacles, torend the darkness, and, as he said, to see the invisible and grasp theintangible, that was beyond his powers.
He turned suddenly to Ya-Bon, who was standing depressed by his silence:
"What's the matter with you, putting on that lugubrious air? Of courseit's you that throw a gloom over me! You always look at the black sideof things . . . like a nigger! . . . Be off."
Ya-Bon was going away discomfited, when some one tapped at the door anda voice said:
"Captain Belval, you're wanted on the telephone."
Patrice hurried out. Who on earth could be telephoning to him so earlyin the morning?
"Who is it?" he asked the nurse.
"I don't know, captain. . . . It's a man's voice; he seemed to want youurgently. The bell had been ringing some time. I was downstairs, in thekitchen. . . ."
Before Patrice's eyes there rose a vision of the telephone in the RueRaynouard, in the big room at the Essares' house. He could not helpwondering if there was anything to connect the two incidents.
He went down one flight of stairs and along a passage. The telephone wasthrough a small waiting-room, in a room that had been turned into alinen-closet. He closed the door behind him.
"Hullo! Captain Belval speaking. What is it?"
A voice, a man's voice which he did not know, replied in breathless,panting tones:
"Ah! . . . Captain Belval! . . . It's you! . . . Look here . . . but I'malmost afraid that it's too late. . . . I don't know if I shall havetime to finish. . . . Did you get the key and the letter? . . ."
"Who are you?" asked Patrice.
"Did you get the key and the letter?" the voice insisted.
"The key, yes," Patrice replied, "but not the letter."
"Not the letter? But this is terrible! Then you don't know . . ."
A hoarse cry struck Patrice's ear and the next thing he caught wasincoherent sounds at the other end of the wire, the noise of analtercation. Then the voice seemed to glue itself to the instrument andhe distinctly heard it gasping:
"Too late! . . . Patrice . . . is that you? . . . Listen, the amethystpendant . . . yes, I have it on me. . . . The pendant. . . . Ah, it'stoo late! . . . I should so much have liked to . . . Patrice. . . .Coralie. . . ."
Then again a loud cry, a heart-rending cry, and confused sounds growingmore distant, in which he seemed to distinguish:
"Help! . . . Help! . . ."
These grew fainter and fainter. Silence followed. And suddenly there wasa little click. The murderer had hung up the receiver.
All this had not taken twenty seconds. But, when Patrice wanted toreplace the telephone, his fingers were gripping it so hard that itneeded an effort to relax them.
He stood utterly dumfounded. His eyes had fastened on a large clockwhich he saw, through the window, on one of the buildings in the yard,marking nineteen minutes past seven; and he mechanically repeated thesefigures, attributing a documentary value to them. Then he askedhimself--so unreal did the scene appear to him--if all this was true andif the crime had not been penetrated within himself, in the depths ofhis aching heart. But the shouting still echoed in his ears; andsuddenly he took up the receiver again, like one clinging desperately tosome undefined hope:
"Hullo!" he cried. "Exchange! . . . Who was it rang me up just now?. . . Are you there? Did you hear the cries? . . . Are you there? . . .Are you there? . . ."
There was no reply. He lost his temper, insulted the exchange, left thelinen-closet, met Ya-Bon and pushed him about:
"Get out of this! It's your fault. Of course you ought to have stayedand looked after Coralie. Be off there now and hold yourself at mydisposal. I'm
going to inform the police. If you hadn't prevented me, itwould have been done long ago and we shouldn't be in this predicament.Off you go!"
He held him back:
"No, don't stir. Your plan's ridiculous. Stay here. Oh, not here in mypocket! You're too impetuous for me, my lad!"
He drove him out and returned to the linen-closet, striding up and downand betraying his excitement in irritable gestures and angry words.Nevertheless, in the midst of his confusion, one idea gradually came tolight, which was that, after all, he had no proof that the crime whichhe suspected had happened at the house in the Rue Raynouard. He must notallow himself to be obsessed by the facts that lingered in his memory tothe point of always seeing the same vision in the same tragic setting.No doubt the drama was being continued, as he had felt that it would be,but perhaps elsewhere and far away from Coralie.
And this first thought led to another: why not investigate matters atonce?
"Yes, why not?" he asked himself. "Before bothering the police,discovering the number of the person who rang me up and thus workingback to the start, a process which it will be time enough to employlater, why shouldn't I telephone to the Rue Raynouard at once, on anypretext and in anybody's name? I shall then have a chance of knowingwhat to think. . . ."
Patrice felt that this measure did not amount to much. Suppose that noone answered, would that prove that the murder had been committed in thehouse, or merely that no one was yet about? Nevertheless, the need to dosomething decided him. He looked up Essares Bey's number in thetelephone-directory and resolutely rang up the exchange.
The strain of waiting was almost more than he could bear. And then hewas conscious of a thrill which vibrated through him from head to foot.He was connected; and some one at the other end was answering the call.
"Hullo!" he said.
"Hullo!" said a voice. "Who are you?"
It was the voice of Essares Bey.
Although this was only natural, since at that moment Essares must begetting his papers ready and preparing his flight, Patrice was so muchtaken aback that he did not know what to say and spoke the first wordsthat came into his head:
"Is that Essares Bey?"
"Yes. Who are you?"
"I'm one of the wounded at the hospital, now under treatment at thehome. . . ."
"Captain Belval, perhaps?"
Patrice was absolutely amazed. So Coralie's husband knew him by name? Hestammered:
"Yes . . . Captain Belval."
"What a lucky thing!" cried Essares Bey, in a tone of delight. "I rangyou up a moment ago, at the home, Captain Belval, to ask . . ."
"Oh, it was you!" interrupted Patrice, whose astonishment knew nobounds.
"Yes, I wanted to know at what time I could speak to Captain Belval inorder to thank him."
"It was _you_! . . . It was _you_! . . ." Patrice repeated, more andmore thunderstruck.
Essares' intonation denoted a certain surprise.
"Yes, wasn't it a curious coincidence?" he said. "Unfortunately, I wascut off, or rather my call was interrupted by somebody else."
"Then you heard?"
"What, Captain Belval?"
"Cries."
"Cries?"
"At least, so it seemed to me; but the connection was very indistinct."
"All that I heard was somebody asking for you, somebody who was in agreat hurry; and, as I was not, I hung up the telephone and postponedthe pleasure of thanking you."
"Of thanking me?"
"Yes, I have heard how my wife was assaulted last night and how you cameto her rescue. And I am anxious to see you and express my gratitude.Shall we make an appointment? Could we meet at the hospital, forinstance, at three o'clock this afternoon?"
Patrice made no reply. The audacity of this man, threatened with arrestand preparing for flight, baffled him. At the same time, he waswondering what Essares' real object had been in telephoning to himwithout being in any way obliged to. But Belval's silence in no waytroubled the banker, who continued his civilities and ended theinscrutable conversation with a monologue in which he replied with thegreatest ease to questions which he kept putting to himself.
In spite of everything, Patrice felt more comfortable. He went back tohis room, lay down on his bed and slept for two hours. Then he sent forYa-Bon.
"This time," he said, "try to control your nerves and not to lose yourhead as you did just now. You were absurd. But don't let's talk aboutit. Have you had your breakfast? No? No more have I. Have you seen thedoctor? No? No more have I. And the surgeon has just promised to takeoff this beastly bandage. You can imagine how pleased I am. A wooden legis all very well; but a head wrapped up in lint, for a lover, never! Geton, look sharp. When we're ready, we'll start for the hospital. LittleMother Coralie can't forbid me to see her there!"
Patrice was as happy as a schoolboy. As he said to Ya-Bon an hour later,on their way to the Porte-Maillot, the clouds were beginning to roll by:
"Yes, Ya-Bon, yes, they are. And this is where we stand. To begin with,Coralie is not in danger. As I hoped, the battle is being fought faraway from her, among the accomplices no doubt, over their millions. Asfor the unfortunate man who rang me up and whose dying cries Ioverheard, he was obviously some unknown friend, for he addressed mefamiliarly and called me by my Christian name. It was certainly he whosent me the key of the garden. Unfortunately, the letter that came withthe key went astray. In the end, he felt constrained to tell meeverything. Just at that moment he was attacked. By whom, you ask.Probably by one of the accomplices, who was frightened of hisrevelations. There you are, Ya-Bon. It's all as clear as noonday. Forthat matter, the truth may just as easily be the exact opposite of whatI suggest. But I don't care. The great thing is to take one's stand upona theory, true or false. Besides, if mine is false, I reserve the rightto shift the responsibility on you. So you know what you're in for.. . ."
At the Porte-Maillot they took a cab and it occurred to Patrice to driveround by the Rue Raynouard. At the junction of this street with the Ruede Passy, they saw Coralie leaving the Rue Raynouard, accompanied by oldSimeon.
She had hailed a taxi and stepped inside. Simeon sat down by thedriver. They went to the hospital in the Champs-Elysees, with Patricefollowing. It was eleven o'clock when they arrived.
"All's well," said Patrice. "While her husband is running away, sherefuses to make any change in her daily life."
He and Ya-Bon lunched in the neighborhood, strolled along the avenue,without losing sight of the hospital, and called there at half-past one.
Patrice at once saw old Simeon, sitting at the end of a covered yardwhere the soldiers used to meet. His head was half wrapped up in theusual comforter; and, with his big yellow spectacles on his nose, he satsmoking his pipe on the chair which he always occupied.
As for Coralie, she was in one of the rooms allotted to her on the firstfloor, seated by the bedside of a patient whose hand she held betweenher own. The man was asleep.
Coralie appeared to Patrice to be very tired. The dark rings round hereyes and the unusual pallor of her cheeks bore witness to her fatigue.
"Poor child!" he thought. "All those blackguards will be the death ofyou."
He now understood, when he remembered the scenes of the night before,why Coralie kept her private life secret and endeavored, at least to thelittle world of the hospital, to be merely the kind sister whom peoplecall by her Christian name. Suspecting the web of crime with which shewas surrounded, she dropped her husband's name and told nobody where shelived. And so well was she protected by the defenses set up by hermodesty and determination that Patrice dared not go to her and stoodrooted to the threshold.
"Yet surely," he said to himself, as he looked at Coralie without beingseen by her, "I'm not going to send her in my card!"
He was making up his mind to enter, when a woman who had come up thestairs, talking loudly as she went, called out:
"Where is madame? . . . M. Simeon, she must come at once!"
Old Simeon, who had climbed the stair
s with her, pointed to whereCoralie sat at the far end of the room; and the woman rushed in. Shesaid a few words to Coralie, who seemed upset and at once, ran to thedoor, passing in front of Patrice, and down the stairs, followed bySimeon and the woman.
"I've got a taxi, ma'am," stammered the woman, all out of breath. "I hadthe luck to find one when I left the house and I kept it. We must bequick, ma'am. . . . The commissary of police told me to . . ."
Patrice, who was downstairs by this time, heard nothing more; but thelast words decided him. He seized hold of Ya-Bon as he passed; and thetwo of them leapt into a cab, telling the driver to follow Coralie'staxi.
"There's news, Ya-Bon, there's news!" said Patrice. "The plot isthickening. The woman is obviously one of the Essares' servants and shehas come for her mistress by the commissary's orders. Therefore thecolonel's disclosures are having their effect. House searched;magistrate's inquest; every sort of worry for Little Mother Coralie; andyou have the cheek to advise me to be careful! You imagine that I wouldleave her to her own devices at such a moment! What a mean nature youmust have, my poor Ya-Bon!"
An idea occurred to him; and he exclaimed:
"Heavens! I hope that ruffian of an Essares hasn't allowed himself to becaught! That would be a disaster! But he was far too sure of himself. Iexpect he's been trifling away his time. . . ."
All through the drive this fear excited Captain Belval and removed hislast scruples. In the end his certainty was absolute. Nothing short ofEssares' arrest could have produced the servant's attitude of panic orCoralie's precipitate departure. Under these conditions, how could hehesitate to interfere in a matter in which his revelations wouldenlighten the police? All the more so as, by revealing less or more,according to circumstances, he could make his evidence subservient toCoralie's interests.
The two cabs pulled up almost simultaneously outside the Essares' house,where a car was already standing. Coralie alighted and disappearedthrough the carriage-gate. The maid and Simeon also crossed thepavement.
"Come along," said Patrice to the Senegalese.
The front-door was ajar and Patrice entered. In the big hall were twopolicemen on duty. Patrice acknowledged their presence with a hurriedmovement of his hand and passed them with the air of a man who belongedto the house and whose importance was so great that nothing done withouthim could be of any use.
The sound of his footsteps echoing on the flags reminded him of theflight of Bournef and his accomplices. He was on the right road.Moreover, there was a drawing-room on the left, the room, communicatingwith the library, to which the accomplices had carried the colonel'sbody. Voices came from the library. He walked across the drawing-room.
At that moment he heard Coralie exclaim in accents of terror:
"Oh, my God, it can't be! . . ."
Two other policemen barred the doorway.
"I am a relation of Mme. Essares'," he said, "her only relation. . . ."
"We have our orders, captain . . ."
"I know, of course. Be sure and let no one in! Ya-Bon, stay here."
And he went in.
But, in the immense room, a group of six or seven gentlemen, no doubtcommissaries of police and magistrates, stood in his way, bending oversomething which he was unable to distinguish. From amidst this groupCoralie suddenly appeared and came towards him, tottering and wringingher hands. The housemaid took her round the waist and pressed her into achair.
"What's the matter?" asked Patrice.
"Madame is feeling faint," replied the woman, still quite distraught."Oh, I'm nearly off my head!"
"But why? What's the reason?"
"It's the master . . . just think! . . . Such a sight! . . . It gave mea turn, too . . ."
"What sight?"
One of the gentlemen left the group and approached:
"Is Mme. Essares ill?"
"It's nothing," said the maid. "A fainting-fit. . . . She is liable tothese attacks."
"Take her away as soon as she can walk. We shall not need her anylonger."
And, addressing Patrice Belval with a questioning air:
"Captain? . . ."
Patrice pretended not to understand:
"Yes, sir," he said, "we will take Mme. Essares away. Her presence, asyou say, is unnecessary. Only I must first . . ."
He moved aside to avoid his interlocutor, and, perceiving that the groupof magistrates had opened out a little, stepped forward. What he now sawexplained Coralie's fainting-fit and the servant's agitation. He himselffelt his flesh creep at a spectacle which was infinitely more horriblethan that of the evening before.
On the floor, near the fireplace, almost at the place where he hadundergone his torture, Essares Bey lay upon his back. He was wearing thesame clothes as on the previous day: a brown-velvet smoking-suit with abraided jacket. His head and shoulders had been covered with a napkin.But one of the men standing around, a divisional surgeon no doubt, washolding up the napkin with one hand and pointing to the dead man's facewith the other, while he offered an explanation in a low voice.
And that face . . . but it was hardly the word for the unspeakable massof flesh, part of which seemed to be charred while the other part formedno more than a bloodstained pulp, mixed with bits of bone and skin,hairs and a broken eye-ball.
"Oh," Patrice blurted out, "how horrible! He was killed and fell withhis head right in the fire. That's how they found him, I suppose?"
The man who had already spoken to him and who appeared to be the mostimportant figure present came up to him once more:
"May I ask who you are?" he demanded.
"Captain Belval, sir, a friend of Mme. Essares, one of the woundedofficers whose lives she has helped to save . . ."
"That may be, sir," replied the important figure, "but you can't stayhere. Nobody must stay here, for that matter. Monsieur le commissaire,please order every one to leave the room, except the doctor, and havethe door guarded. Let no one enter on any pretext whatever. . . ."
"Sir," Patrice insisted, "I have some very serious information tocommunicate."
"I shall be pleased to receive it, captain, but later on. You mustexcuse me now."