Alias The Lone Wolf - Louis Joseph Vance
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"What are you thinking of, monsieur?"
"But naturally of ridding you of an embarrassing and perhaps dangerous
companion."
"If you mean you're planning to jump down and run for it," Athenais
replied, "you're a fool. You'll not get far with a motor car pursuing
you and sergents de ville abnormally on the qui vive because the crime
wave that followed demobilisation as yet shows no signs of subsiding."
"But, mademoiselle, it makes me so unhappy to have any shadow but my
own."
"Then rest tranquil here with me. It isn't much farther to my
apartment."
"Possibly it would be better to drop you there first--"
"Nothing of the sort; but positively the contrary."
"My dear child! if I were to do as you wish they would think--"
"My dear Paul, I don't give a damn what they think. Remember I am
specially charged with the preservation of your life while in Paris.
Besides, my apartment is the most discreet little rez-de-chaussee one
could wish. There is more than one way in and out. And once they think
you are placed for the night, it's more than likely they won't even set
a watch, but will trot off to report. Then you can slip away when you
will...." He stared, knowing a moment of doubt to which a hard little
laugh put a period.
"Oh, you needn't be so thoughtful of my reputation! If this were the
worst that could be said of me--"
Lanyard laughed in turn, quietly tolerant, and squeezed her hand again.
"You are a dear," he said, "but you need to be a far better actress to
deceive me about such matters."
"Don't be stupid!" her sulky voice retorted.
"I'm not."
He bent forward again, folding his arms on the ledge of the apron,
studying the streets and consulting an astonishingly accurate mental
map of Paris which more than once had stood him in good stead in other
times.
After a little the girl's hand crept along his arm, took possession of
his hand and used it as a lever to swing him back to face her.
In the stronger lighting of the Boulevard Haussmann her face seemed
oddly childlike, oddly luminous with appeal.
"Please, petit Monsieur Paul! I ask it of you, I wish it.... To please
me?"
"O Lord!" Lanyard sighed--"how is one to resist when you plead so
prettily to be compromised?"
"Since that's settled"--of a sudden the imploring child was replaced by
self-possessed Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux--"you may have your hand
back again. I assure you I have no more use for it."
The hansom turned off the boulevard, affording Lanyard an opportunity
to look back through the side window.
"Still on the trail," he announced. "But they've got the lights on
now."
With a profound sigh from the heart the horse stopped in front of a
corner apartment building and later, with a groan almost human,
responded to the whip and jingled the hansom away, leaving Lanyard the
poorer by the exorbitant fare he had promised and something more.
Athenais was already at the main entrance, ringing for the concierge.
Lanyard hastened to join her, but before he could cross the sidewalk a
motor-car poked its nose round the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann, a
short block away, and bore swiftly their way, seeming to search the
street suspiciously with its blank, lidless eyes of glare.
"Peste!" breathed the girl. "I have a private entrance and my own key.
We could have used that had I imagined this sacred pig of a
concierge--!"
The latch clicked. She thrust the door open and slipped into dense
darkness. Lanyard lingered another instant. The car was slowing down,
and the street lamp on the corner revealed plainly a masculine arm
resting on its window-sill; but the spying face above the arm was only
a blur.
"Come, monsieur!"
Lanyard stepped in and shut the door. A hand with which he was
beginning to feel fairly well acquainted found his and led him through
the dead obscurity to another pause. A key grated in a lock, the hand
drew him on again, a second door closed behind him.
"We are chez moi," said a voice in the dark.
"One could do with a light."
"Wait. This way."
The hand guided him across a room of moderate size, avoiding its
furniture with almost uncanny ease, then again brought him to a halt.
Brass rings clashed softly on a pole, a gap opened in heavy draperies
curtaining a window, a shaft of street light threw the girl's profile
into soft relief. She drew him to her till their shoulders touched.
"You see..."
He bent his head close to hers, conscious of a caressing tendril of
hair that touched his cheek, and the sweet warmth and fragrance of her;
and peering through the draperies saw their pursuing motor car at
pause, not at the curb, but in the middle of the street before the
house. The man's arm still rested on the sill of the window; the pale
oval of the face above it was still vague. Abruptly both disappeared, a
door slammed on the far side of the car, and the car itself, after a
moment's wait, gathered way with whining gears and vanished, leaving
nothing human visible in the quiet street.
"What did that mean? Did they pick somebody up?"
"But quite otherwise, mademoiselle."
"Then what has become of him?"
"In the shadow of the door across the way: don't you see the deeper
shadow of his figure in the corner, to this side. And there ... Ah,
dolt!"
The man in the doorway had moved, cautiously thrusting one hand out of
the shadow far enough for the street lights to shine upon the dial of
his wrist-watch. Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was
accomplished.
"That's enough," said Lanyard, drawing the draperies close again. "No
trouble to make a fool of that one, God has so nobly prepared the
soil." The girl said nothing. They no longer touched, and she was for
the time so still that he might almost have fancied himself alone. But
in that quiet room he could hear her breathing close beside him, not
heavily but with a rapid accent hinting at an agitation which her voice
bore out when she answered his wondering: "Mademoiselle?" "J'y suis,
petit Monsieur Paul."
"Is anything the matter?"
"No ... no: there is nothing the matter."
"I'm afraid I have tired you out to-night."
"I do not deny I am a little weary."
"Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive, not yet, petit Monsieur Paul." A trace of
hard humour crept into her tone: "It is all in the night's work, as the
saying should be in Paris."
"Three favours more; then I will do you one in return."
"Ask..."
"Be so kind as to make a light and find me a pocket flash-lamp if you
have one."
"I can do the latter without the former. It is better that we show no
light; one stray gleam through the curtains would tell too much. Wait."
A noise of light footsteps muffled by a rug, high heels tapping on
uncovered floor, the scrape of a drawer pulled out: and she returned to
give him a little nickelled electric torch.
"And then--?"
"Liane's address, if you know it."
The girl named a number on an avenue not far distant. Lanyard remarked
this.
"Yes; you can walk there in less than five minutes. And finally?"
"Show me the way out." Again she made no response. He pursued in some
constraint: "Thus you will enable me to make you my only inadequate
return--leave you to your rest."
Yet another space of silence; then a gusty little laugh. "That is a
great favour, truly, petit Monsieur Paul! So give me your hand once
more." But she no longer clung to it as before; the clasp of her
fingers was light, cool, impersonal to the point of indifference.
Vexed, resentful of her resentment, Lanyard suffered her guidance
through the darkness of another room, a short corridor, and then a
third room, where she left him for a moment.
He heard again the clash of curtain rings. The dim violet rectangle of
a window appeared in the darkness, the figure of the woman in vague
silhouette against it. A sash was lifted noiselessly, rain-sweet air
breathed into the apartment. Athenais returned to his side, pressed
into his palm a key.
"That window opens on a court. The drop from the sill is no more than
four feet. In the wall immediately opposite you will find a door. This
key opens it. Lock the door behind you, and at your first opportunity
throw away the key: I have several copies. You will find yourself in a
corridor leading to the entrance of the apartment house in the rear of
this, facing on the next street. Demand the cordon of the concierge as
if you were a late guest leaving one of the apartments. He will make no
difficulty about opening.... I think that is all."
"Not quite. There remains for me to attempt the impossible, to prove my
gratitude, Athenais, in mere, unmeaning words."
"Don't try, Paul." The voice was softened once more, its accents
broken. "Words cannot serve us, you and me! There is one way only, and
that, I know, is ... rue Barre!" Her sad laugh fluttered, she crept
into his arms. "But still, petit Monsieur Paul, _she_ will not care
if ... only once!"
She clung to him for a long, long moment, then released his lips.
"Men have kissed me, yes, not a few," she whispered, resting her face
on his bosom, "but you alone have known my kiss. Go now, my dear, while
I have strength to let you go, and ... make me one little promise..."
"Whatever you ask, Athenais...."
"Never come back, unless you need me; for I shall not have so much
strength another time."
Alone, she rested a burning forehead against the lifted window-sash,
straining her vision to follow his shadow as it moved through the murk
of the court below and lost itself in the deeper gloom of the opposing
wall.
XVI
THE HOUSE OF LILITH
It stood four-square and massive on a corner between the avenues de
Friedland et des Champs-Elysees, near their junction at the Place de
l'Etoile: a solid stone pile of a town-house in the most modern mode,
without architectural beauty, boasting little attempt at exterior
embellishment, but smelling aloud of Money; just such a maison de ville
as a decent bourgeois banker might be expected to build him when he
contemplates retiring after doing the Rothschilds a wicked one in the
eye.
It was like Liane's impudence, too. Lanyard smiled at the thought as he
studied the mansion from the backwards of a dark doorway in the
diagonally opposed block of dwellings. Her kind was always sure to
seek, once its fortunes were on firm footing, to establish itself, as
here, in the very heart of an exclusive residential district; as if
thinking to absorb social sanctity through the simple act of rubbing
shoulders with it; or else, as was more likely to be the case with a
woman of Liane Delorme's temper, desiring more to affront a world from
which she was outcast than to lay siege to its favour.
It seemed, however, truly deplorable that Liane should have proved so
conventional-minded in this particular respect. It rendered one's pet
project much too difficult of execution. Earnestly as one desired to
have a look at the inside of that house without the knowledge of its
inmates, its aspect was forbidding and discouraging in the utmost
extreme.
Heavy gates of wrought bronze guarded the front doors. The single side
or service-door was similarly protected if more simply. And stout
grilles of bronze barred every window on the level of the street.
Now none of these could have withstood the attack of a man of ingenuity
with a little time at his disposal. But Lanyard could count on only the
few remaining minutes of true night. Retarded though it might be by
shrouded skies, dawn must come all too soon for his comfort. Yet he was
conscious of no choice in the matter: he must and in spite of
everything would know to-night what was going on behind that blank
screen of stone. To-morrow night would be too late. Tonight, if there
were any warrant for his suspicions, the jewels of Eve de Montalais lay
in the dwelling of Liane Delorme; or if they were not there, the secret
of their hiding was. But to-morrow both, and more than likely Liane as
well, would be on the wing; or Lanyard had been sorely mistaken in
seeing in her as badly frightened a woman as he had ever known, when
she had learned of the assassination of de Lorgnes.
It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme
was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is,
with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its
protection. But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with
enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and
order as she herself. And she was afraid of that, infinitely more
disturbed in mind and spirit than she would have been in the face of
any threat on the part of the police. The Prefecture was a known and
measured force, an engine that ran as it were on mapped lines of rail;
its moves might be forecast, guarded against, watched, evaded. But this
other force worked in the dark, this hostile power personified in the
creature who had called himself Albert Dupont; the very composition of
its being was cloaked in a secrecy impenetrable and terrifying, its
intentions and its workings could not be surmised or opposed until it
struck and the success or failure of the stroke revealed its origin and
aim.
Liane--or one misjudged her--would never sit still and wait for the
blow to fall. She was too high-strung, too much in love with life. She
must either strike first in self-defence--and, in such case, strike at
what?--or remove beyond the range of the enemy's malice. Lanyard was
confident she would choose the latter course.
But confidence was not knowledge....
He transferred his attention from the formidable defences of the lower
storey to the second. Here all the windows were of the type called
french, and opened inward from shallow balconies with wrought bronze
railings. Lanyard was acquainted with every form of fastening used for
such windows; all were simple, none could resist his persuasions,
provided he stood upon one of those balconies. Nor did he count it a
difficult matter for a man of his activity and strength to scale the
front of the house as far as the second storey; its walls were builded
of heavy blocks of dressed stone with deep horizontal channels between
each tier. These grooves would be greasy with rain; otherwise one could
hardly ask for better footholds. A climb of some twelve or fifteen feet
to the balcony: one should be able to make that within two minutes,
granted freedom from interruption. The rub was there; the quarter
seemed quite fast asleep; in the five minutes which had elapsed since
Lanyard had ensconced himself in the doorway no motor car had passed,
not a footfall had disturbed the stillness, never a sound of any sort
had come to his attention other than one distant blare of a two-toned
automobile horn from the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. But one
dared not count on long continuance of such conditions. Already the sky
showed a lighter shade above the profile of the roofs. And one wakeful
watcher at a nearby window would spell ruin.
Nevertheless he must adventure the consequences....
Poised to leave his shelter and dart across the street, with his point
of attack already selected, his thoughts already busy with
consideration of steps to follow--he checked and fell still farther
back into the shadow. Something was happening in the house across the
way.
A man had opened the service-door and paused behind the bronze gate.
There was no light behind him, and the gloom and intervening strips of
metal rendered his figure indistinct. Lanyard's high-keyed perceptions
had none the less been instant to remark that slight movement and the
accompanying change in the texture of the darkness barred by the gate.
Following a little wait, it swung slowly out, perhaps eighteen inches,
the man advancing with it and again halting to peer up and down the
street. Then quickly, as if alarmed, he withdrew, shut the gate, and
disappeared, closing the service-door behind him.
Listening intently, Lanyard heard no click of latch, such as should
have been audible in that dead hour of hush. Evidently the fellow had
neglected to make fast the gate. Possibly he had been similarly remiss
about fastening the door. But what was he up to? Why this furtive
appearance, why the retreat so abruptly executed?
By way of answer came the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the
car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the
direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it
stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella and ran to hold the door;
but Liane Delorme would not wait for him. The car had not stopped when
she threw the door open; on the instant when its wheels ceased to turn
she jumped down and ran toward the house, heedless of the rain.
At the same time one side of the great front doors swung inward, and a
footman ran out to open the gates. The lackey with the umbrella, though
he moved briskly, failed to catch up with Liane before she sped up the
steps. So he closed the umbrella and trotted back to his place beside
the chauffeur. The footman shut gates and door as the limousine moved
away: it had not been sixty seconds at rest. In fifteen more street and
house were both as they had been, save that a light now shone through
the plate glass of the latter's great doors. And that was soon
extinguished.
Conceiving that the man who had appeared at the service entrance was
the same who had admitted Liane, Lanyard told himself he understood:
impatient for his bed, the fellow had gone to the service gate to spy
out for signs of madame's return. Now if only it were true that he had
failed to close it securely----!
It proved so. The gate gave readily to Lanyard's pull. The knob of the
small door turned silently. He stepped across the threshold, and shut
himself into an unlighted hall, thoughtfully apeing the negligence of
the servant and leaving the door barely on the latch by way of
provision against a forced retreat.
So far, good. He felt for his pocket torch, then sharply fell back into
the nearest corner and made himself as inconspicuous as might be.
Footsteps were sounding on the other side of an unseen wall. He waited,
breathless, stirless.
A latch rattled, and at about three yards' distance a narrow door
opened, marked by a widening glow of light. A liveried footman--beyond
a doubt he who admitted the mistress of the house--entered, carrying an
electric candle, yawned with a superstitious hand before his mouth and,
looking to neither right nor left, turned away from Lanyard and trudged
wearily back to the household offices. At the far end of the long
hallway a door closed behind him--and Lanyard moved swiftly.
The door which had let the footman into the hall admitted to a spacious
foyer which set apart the entrance and--as the play of the electric
torch disclosed--a deep and richly furnished dining-room. To one side a
broad flight of stairs ascended: Lanyard went up with the activity of a
cat, making no more noise.
The second floor proved to be devoted mainly to a drawing-room, a
lounge, and a library, all furnished in a weird, inchoate sort of
magnificence, with money rather than with taste, if one might judge
fairly by the fitful and guarded beam of the torch. The taste may have
been less questionable than Lanyard thought; but the evidences of
luxurious tendencies and wealth recklessly wasted in their
gratification were irrefutable.
Lights were burning on the floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices
drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or
a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the
conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a
ceremony apt to consume a considerable time with a woman of Liane's age
and disposition, passionately bent on preserving to the grave a
semblance of freshness in her charms. Lanyard reckoned on anything from
fifteen minutes to an hour before her couching would be accomplished
and the maid out of the way. Ten minutes more, and Liane ought to be
asleep. If it turned out otherwise--well, one would have to deal with
her awake. No need to be gravely concerned about that: to envisage the
contingency was to be prepared against it.
Believing he must possess his soul in patience for an indeterminable
wait, he was casting about for a place to secrete himself, when a
change in the tenor of the talk between mistress and maid was conveyed
by a sudden lift of half an octave in the latter's voice, sounding a
sharp note of protest, to be answered by Liane in accent of overbearing
anger.
One simply could not rest without knowing what that meant: Lanyard
mounted the second flight of stairs as swiftly, surely, and soundlessly
as he had the first. But just below a landing, where the staircase had
an angle, he paused, crouching low, flat to the steps, his head lifted
just enough to permit him to see, above the edge of the topmost, a
section of glowing, rose-pink wall--it would be rose-pink!
He could see nothing more; and Liane had already silenced the maid, or
rather reduced her to responses feebly submissive, and, consonant with
the nature of her kind, was rubbing it in.
"And why should you not go with me to that America if I wish it?"
Lanyard heard her say. "Is it likely I would leave you behind to spread
scandal concerning me with that gabbling tongue in your head of an
overgrown cabbage? It is some lover, then, who has inspired this folly
in you? Tell him from me, if you please, the day you leave my service
without my consent, it will be a sorry sweetheart that comes to him."
"It is well, madame. I say no more. I will go."
"I believe it well--you will go! You were mad ever to dream otherwise.
Fetch my jewel-case--the large one, of steel, with the American lock."
"Madame takes all her jewels, then?" the maid enquired, moving about
the room.
"But naturally. What do you think? That I leave them here for the
scullery-maids to give their maquereaux? I shall pack them tonight,
before I sleep."
("Damnation!"--from Lanyard, beneath his breath. More delay!)
"And we leave to-morrow, madame, at what time?"
"It matters not, so we are in Cherbourg by midnight. I may decide to
make the trip by automobile."
"And madame's packing?"
"You know well what to pack, better than I. Get my boxes up the first
thing in the morning and use your own judgment. If there are questions
to be asked, save them until I wake up. I shall sleep till noon."
"That is all, madame?"
"That is all. You may go."
"Good-night, madame."
"Good-night, Marthe."
The stairway was no place to stop. Lanyard slipped like a shadow to the
floor below, and took shelter behind a jog in the wall of the grand
salon where, standing in deep darkness, he commanded a view of the
hall.
The maid came down, carrying an electric candle like the footman's. Its
rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common
to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and
last an animal. With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated,
looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought.
Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its
half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret thought
amused the woman, a shadow deepened in the visible corner of her
full-lipped mouth. One fancied something sardonic in that covert smile.
She went on down. A latch on the ground floor clicked as the door to
the service hallway was gently closed. Lanyard came out of hiding with
a fresh enterprise abrew.
One must kill time somehow, Liane would be at least another half an
hour busy with her jewellery, and the thought presented itself that the
library, immediately beneath her room, should be worthy an
investigation. In such establishments it is a tradition that the
household safe shall be located somewhere in the library; and such
strong-boxes are apt to be naive contrivances. Lanyard did not hope to
find the Montalais jewels stored away in such a place, Liane would
surely take better care of them than that; assuming they were in her
possession they would be under her hand, if not confused with her own
treasures; still it could do no harm to make sure.
Confident of being warned at need by his hearing, which was normally
supersensitive and, when he was engaged as now, keyed to preterhuman
acuteness, he went coolly about the business, and at his first step
found a portable reading-lamp on a long cord and coolly switched on its
hooded light.
The library was furnished with bulky old Italian pieces of carved oak,
not especially well selected, but suitable enough with one exception, a
ponderous buffet, an exquisite bit of workmanship both in design and in
detail but completely out of place in a room of that character. At
least nine feet in length, it stood out four from the wall. Three heavy
doors guarded by modern locks gave access to the body beneath its tier
of drawers. But--this drew a frowning stare--there was a key in the
lock of the middle door.
"There's such a thing as too much luck," Lanyard communed. "First the
service gate and door, and now this, ready to my hand----!"