The Essential Maurice Leblanc Collection. Морис Леблан
lose a minute."
"Not a minute, Mr. Wilson, except to tell you how pleased I have been to meet you and how I envy the leader who has an assistant so valuable as yourself."
Courteous bows were exchanged, as between two adversaries on the fencing-ground who bear each other no hatred, but who are constrained by fate to fight to the death. And Lupin took my arm and dragged me outside:
"What do you say to that, old fellow? There's a dinner that will be worth describing in your memoirs of me!"
He closed the door of the restaurant and, stopping a little way off:
"Do you smoke?"
"No, but no more do you, surely."
"No more do I."
He lit a cigarette with a wax match which he waved several times to put it out. But he at once flung away the cigarette, ran across the road and joined two men who had emerged from the shadow, as though summoned by a signal. He talked to them for a few minutes on the opposite pavement and then returned to me:
"I beg your pardon; but I shall have my work cut out with that confounded Shears. I swear, however, that he has not done with Lupin yet.... By Jupiter, I'll show the fellow the stuff I'm made of!... Good night.... The unspeakable Wilson is right: I have not a minute to lose."
He walked rapidly away.
Thus ended that strange evening, or, at least that part of it with which I had to do. For many other incidents occurred during the hours that followed, events which the confidences of the others who were present at that dinner have fortunately enabled me to reconstruct in detail.
* * * * *
At the very moment when Lupin left me, Holmlock Shears took out his watch and rose in his turn:
"Twenty to nine. At nine o'clock, I am to meet the count and countess at the railway station."
"Let's go!" cried Wilson, tossing off two glasses of whiskey in succession.
They went out.
"Wilson, don't turn your head.... We may be followed: if so, let us act as though we don't care whether we are or not.... Tell me, Wilson, what's your opinion: why was Lupin in that restaurant?"
Wilson, without hesitation, replied:
"To get some dinner."
"Wilson, the longer we work together, the more clearly I perceive the constant progress you are making. Upon my word, you're becoming amazing."
Wilson blushed with satisfaction in the dark; and Shears resumed:
"Yes, he went to get some dinner and then, most likely, to make sure if I am really going to Crozon, as Ganimard says I am, in his interview. I shall leave, therefore, so as not to disappoint him. But, as it is a question of gaining time upon him, I shall not leave."
"Ah!" said Wilson, nonplussed.
"I want you, old chap, to go down this street. Take a cab, take two cabs, three cabs. Come back later to fetch the bags which we left in the cloak room and then drive as fast as you can to the lyse-Palace."
"And what am I to do at the lyse-Palace?"
"Ask for a room, go to bed, sleep the sleep of the just and await my instructions."
* * * * *
Wilson, proud of the important task allotted to him, went off. Holmlock Shears took his ticket at the railway station and entered the Amiens express, in which the Comte and Comtesse de Crozon had already taken their seats.
He merely bowed to them, lit a second pipe and smoked it placidly, standing, in the corridor.
The train started. Ten minutes later, he came and sat down beside the countess and asked:
"Have you the ring on you, madame?"
"Yes."
"Please let me look at it."
He took it and examined it:
"As I thought: it is a faked diamond."
"Faked?"
"Yes, by a new process which consists in subjecting diamond-dust to enormous heat until it melts ... whereupon it is simply reformed into a single diamond."
"Why, but my diamond is real!"
"Yes, yours; but this is not yours."
"Where is mine, then?"
"In the hands of Arsne Lupin."
"And this one?"
"This one was put in its place and slipped into Herr Bleichen's tooth-powder flask, where you found it."
"Then it's an imitation?"
"Absolutely."
Nonplussed and overwhelmed, the countess said nothing more, while her husband, refusing to believe the statement, turned the jewel over and over in his fingers. She finished by stammering out:
"But it's impossible! Why didn't they just simply take it? And how did they get it?"
"That's just what I mean to try to discover."
"At Crozon?"
"No, I shall get out at Creil and return to Paris. That's where the game between Arsne Lupin and myself must be played out. The tricks will count the same, wherever we make them; but it is better that Lupin should think that I am out of town."
"Still ..."
"What difference can it make to you, madame? The main object is your diamond, is it not?"
"Yes."
"Well, set your mind at rest. Only a little while ago, I gave an undertaking which will be much more difficult to keep. On the word of Holmlock Shears, you shall have the real diamond back."
The train slowed down. He put the imitation diamond in his pocket and opened the carriage-door. The count cried:
"Take care; that's the wrong side!"
"Lupin will lose my tracks this way, if he's having me shadowed. Good-bye."
A porter protested. The Englishman made for the station-master's office. Fifty minutes later, he jumped into a train which brought him back to Paris a little before midnight.
He ran across the station into the refreshment room, went out by the other door and sprang into a cab:
"Drive to the Rue Clapeyron."
After making sure that he was not being followed, he stopped the cab at the commencement of the street and began to make a careful examination of the house in which Matre Detinan lived and of the two adjoining houses. He paced off certain distances and noted the measurements in his memorandum book:
"Now drive to the Avenue Henri-Martin."
He dismissed his cab at the corner of the avenue and the Rue de la Pompe, walked along the pavement to No. 134 and went through the same performance in front of the house which Baron d'Hautrec had occupied and the two houses by which it was hemmed in on either side, measuring the width of their respective frontages and calculating the depth of the little gardens in front of the houses.
The avenue was deserted and very dark under its four rows of trees, amid which an occasional gas-jet seemed to struggle vainly against the thickness of the gloom. One of these lamps threw a pale light upon a part of the house and Shears saw the notice "To Let" hanging on the railings, saw the two neglected walks that encircled the miniature lawn and the great