Alias The Lone Wolf - Louis Joseph Vance
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
At eight o'clock they were passing through Lisieux, one hundred and
eighteen miles from Paris.
Lanyard made mental calculations.
"The light will hold till after nine," he informed Liane. "By that time
we shall have left Caen behind."
"I understand," she said coolly; "it will be, then, after Caen."
"Presumably."
"Another hour of peace of mind!" She yawned delicately. "I think--I am
bored by this speed--I think I shall have a nap."
Composedly she arranged pillows, put her pretty feet upon the jewel
case and, turning her face from Lanyard, dozed.
"I think," he reflected, "that the world is more rich in remarkable
women than in remarkable men!"
A luminous lilac twilight vied with the street lamps of Caen when the
limousine rolled through the city at moderate speed. Lanyard utilized
this occasion to confer with Jules through the window.
"Beyond the town," he said, "you will stop just round the first
suitable turning, so that we can't be seen before the corner is turned.
Draw off to the side of the road and--I think it would be advisable to
have a little engine trouble."
"Very good, sir," said Jules without looking round. Then he added in a
voice of complete respect: "Pardon, sir, but--madame's orders?"
"If they are not"--Lanyard was nettled--"she will countermand them."
"Quite so, sir. And--if you don't mind my asking--what's the idea?"
"I presume you set some value on your skin?"
"Plumb crazy about it."
"Mademoiselle Delorme and I are afflicted with the same idiosyncrasy.
We want to save our lives, and we don't mind saving yours at the same
time."
"That's more than fair with me. But is that all I'm to know?"
"If the information is any comfort to you: in a grey car which has been
following us ever since we left St. Germain, is the man who--I
believe--murdered Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes on the Lyons rapide, and
who--I know--tried last night to murder Mademoiselle Delorme."
"And I suppose that, in his big-hearted, wholesaler's way, he wouldn't
mind making a bag of the lot of us tonight."
"I'm afraid you have reason..."
"If you're planning to put a crimp in his ambitions, sir, I've got a
pistol I know how to use."
"Better have it handy, though I don't think we'll need it yet. Our
present plan is merely to change cars with Leon and Marthe; the grey
car will pass and go on ahead before we make the shift; then you,
mademoiselle and I follow in the touring car, the others in the
limousine. If there's a trap, as we have every reason to anticipate
there will, the touring car will get through--or we'll hope so."
"Ah-h!" Jules used the tone of one who perceives enlightenment as a
blinding flash. "Marthe and Leon are in on the dirty work too, eh?"
"What makes you think that?"
"Putting two and two together--what you've just told me with what I've
been noticing and wondering about."
"Then you think those two--"
"Marthe and Leon," Jules pronounced with deliberation, "are two very
bad eggs, if you ask me. I shan't shed a solitary tear if something sad
happens to them in this 'bus to-night."
There was no time then to delve into his reasons for this statement of
feeling. The outskirts of Caen were dropping behind. Providentially,
the first bend in the road to Bayeux afforded good cover on the side
toward the town. Jules shut off the power as he made the turn, and
braked to a dead stop in lee of a row of outhouses. Lanyard was on the
ground as soon as the wheels ceased to turn, Jules almost as quickly.
"Now for your engine trouble," Lanyard instructed. "Nothing serious,
you understand--simply an adjustment to excuse a few minutes' delay and
lend colour to our impatience."
"Got you the first time," Jules replied, unlatching and raising one
wing of the hood.
Lanyard moved toward the middle of the road and flagged the Delorme
touring car as it rounded the turn, a few seconds later, at such speed
that Leon was put to it to stop the car fifty yards beyond the
limousine. The man jumped down and, followed by the maid, ran back, but
before he reached the limousine was obliged to jump aside to escape the
grey car which, tooled by a crack racing hand, took the corner on two
wheels, then straightened out and tore past in a smother of dust, with
its muffler cut out and the exhaust bellowing like a machine-gun.
Lanyard counted four figures, two on the front seat, two in the
tonneau. More than this, the headlong speed and the failing light
rendered it impossible to see--though had the one been less and the
other stronger, he could have gained little more information from
inspection of those four shapes shrouded in dust coats and masked with
goggles.
Watching its rear light dwindle, he fancied that the grey shadow was
slowing down; but one could not be sure about that.
"There is something wrong, monsieur?"
The man Leon was at his elbow. Lanyard replied with the curt nod of a
disgruntled motorist.
"Something--Jules can tell you," he said shortly.
"Meanwhile, Mademoiselle Delorme and I have decided not to wait. We've
got no time to spare. We will take your car and go on."
"But, monsieur, I--" Leon began to expostulate.
The icy accents of Liane Delorme cut it: "Well, Leon: what is your
objection?"
"Objection, madame?" the fellow faltered. "Pardon--but it is not for
me to object. I--I was merely startled."
"Then get over that at once," he was advised; "and bring my
jewelcase--Marthe will point it out to you--to the touring-car."
"Yes, madame, immediately."
"Also the lunch-hamper, if you please."
"Assuredly, monsieur."
Leon departed hastily for the limousine, where Marthe joined him, while
Lanyard and Liane Delorme proceeded to the touring car.
"But what on earth do you want with that hamper, monsieur?"
"Hush, little sister, not so loud! Brother thinks he has another idea."
"Then Heaven forbid that I should interfere!"
Staggering under its weight, Leon shouldered the jewelcase and carried
it to the touring car, where Liane superintended its disposal in the
luggage-jammed tonneau. A second trip, less laborious, brought them the
hamper. Liane uttered perfunctory thanks and called to Jules, who was
still tinkering at the limousine engine with the aid of an electric
torch.
"Come, Jules! Leave Leon to attend to what is required there."
"Very good, madame."
Jules strolled over to the touring car and settled down at the wheel.
Liane Delorme had the seat beside him.
Lanyard had established himself in a debatable space in the tonneau to
which his right was disputed by bags and boxes of every shape, size and
description.
"How long, Jules, will Leon need--?"
"Five minutes, madame, if he takes his time about it."
"Then let us hasten."
They drew away from the limousine so quickly that in thirty seconds its
headlights were all that marked its stand.
Lanyard studied the phosphorescent dial of his wristwatch. From first
to last the transaction had consumed little more than three minutes.
Liane slewed round to talk over the back of the seat.
"What time is it, monsieur?"
"Ten after nine. In an hour precisely the moon will rise."
"It will be in this hour of darkness, then..."
A bend in the road blotted out the stationary lights of the limousine.
There was no tail-light visible on the road before them. Lanyard
touched Jules on the shoulder.
"Switch off your lights," he said--"all of them. Then find a place
where we can turn off and wait till Leon and Marthe pass us."
In sudden blindness the car moved on slowly, groping its way for a few
hundred yards. Then Jules picked out the mouth of a narrow lane,
overshadowed by dense foliage, ran past, stopped, and backed into it.
In four minutes by Lanyard's watch the pulse of the limousine began to
beat upon the stillness of that sleepy countryside. A blue-white glare
like naked and hungry steel leapt quivering past the bend, swept in a
wide arc as the lamps themselves became visible, and lay horizontal
with the road as the car bored past.
"Evidently Leon feels quite lost without us," Lanyard commented.
"Shoot, Jules--follow his rear lamp, and _don't_ cut out your muffler.
Can you manage without headlights for a while?"
"I drove an ambulance for four years, sir."
The car swung out into the main highway. Far ahead the red sardonic eye
in the rear of the limousine leered as if mocking their hopes of
keeping it in sight. Jules, however, proved unresentful; and he was
marvellously competent.
"To anybody who's ever piloted a load of casualties through eighteen
inches of mud, dodging shell holes and shells on their way to make new
holes, in a black rainstorm at midnight--this sort of thing," Jules
announced--"a hard, smooth road under a clear sky--is simple pie."
So it may have seemed to him. But to Lanyard and Liane Delorme, hurled
along a road they could not see at anywhere from forty to sixty miles
an hour, with no manner of guidance other than an elusive tail-lamp
which was forever whisking round corners and remaining invisible till
Jules found his way round in turn, by instinct or second sight or
intuition--whatever it was, it proved unfailing--it was a nervous
time.
And there was half an hour of it...
They were swooping down a long grade with a sharp turn at the bottom,
as they knew from the fact that the red eye had just winked out,
somewhere on ahead, there sounded a grinding crash, the noise of a
stout fabric rent and crushed with the clash and clatter of shivered
glass.
"Easy," Lanyard cautioned--"and ready with the lights!"
Both warnings were superfluous. Jules had already disengaged the gears.
Gravity carried the car round the curve, slowly, smoothly, silently;
under constraint of its brakes it slid to a pause on a steep though
brief descent, and hung there like an animal poised to spring, purring
softly.
Below, at the foot of the hill, the headlights of another car, standing
at some distance and to the right of the road, furnished lurid
illumination to the theatre of disaster.
Something, its nature just then mysterious, had apparently caused Leon
to lose control of the heavy car, so that it had skidded into a ditch
and capsized. Four men, crude shapes of nightmare in enveloping
dust-coats and disfiguring goggles, were swarming round the wreck. Two
were helping the driver out, two others having their gallantry in
performing like service for the maid rewarded by a torrent of
vituperative denunciation, half hysterical and wholly infuriated.
By the freedom of her gestures, which was rivalled only by that of her
language, the dishevelled, storming figure of Marthe was manifestly
uninjured. And in another moment it was seen, as Leon found his feet
and limped toward the others, that he had suffered only slight damage
at the worst.
Lanyard drew attention to a dark serpentine line that lay like a dead
snake upon the lighted surface of the road. Jules grunted in token of
comprehension. Liane Delorme breathlessly demanded: "What is it?"
"An old trick," Lanyard explained: "A wire cable stretched between
trees diagonally across the road, about as high as the middle of the
windshield. The impetus of the limousine broke it, but not before it
had slewed the car off toward the ditch, wrenching the wheel out of the
driver's hands."
He fondled the pistol which Jules had handed him, slipped the safety
catch, and said: "Now before they wake up, Jules--give her all she's
got!"
Jules released the brakes and, as the car gathered way, noiselessly
slipped the gear shift into the fourth speed and bore heavily on the
accelerator. They were making forty miles an hour when they struck the
level and thundered past the group.
A glimpse of startled faces, the scream of a man who had strayed
incautiously into the roadway and stopped there, apparently petrified
by the peril that bore down upon him without lights or any other
warning, until one of the forward fenders struck and hurled him aside
like a straw--and only the night of the open road lay before them.
Jules touched the headlight switch and opened the exhaust. Above the
roaring of the latter Lanyard fancied he could hear a faint rattling
sound. He looked back and smiled grimly. Sharp, short flames of orange
and scarlet were stabbing the darkness. Somebody had opened fire with
an automatic pistol.... Sheer waste of ammunition!
The pace waxed terrific on a road, like so many roads of France,
apparently interminable and straight. On either hand endless ranks of
poplars rattled like loose palings of some tremendous picket fence. And
yet, long before the road turned, Lanyard, staring astern as he knelt
on the rear seat with arms crossed on the folded top, saw the two white
eyes of the grey car swing into view and start in pursuit. Quick work,
he called it.
He crawled forward and communicated his news, shouting to make himself
heard.
"Don't ease up unless you have to," he counselled; "don't think we dare
give them an inch."
Back at his post of observation, he watched, hoping against hope, while
the car lunged and tore like a mad thing through the night, snoring up
grades, screaming down them, drumming across the levels, clattering
wildly through villages and hamlets; while the moon rose and gathered
strength and made the road a streaming river of milk and ink; while his
heart sank as minute succeeded minute, mile followed mile, and ever the
lights of the pursuing car, lost to sight from time to time, reappeared
with a brighter, fiercer glow, and conviction forced itself home that
they were being gradually but surely overhauled.
He took this intelligence to the ear of Jules. The chauffeur answered
only with a worried shake of his head that said too plainly he was
doing his best, extracting every ounce of power from the engine.
Ill luck ambushed them in the streets of a sizable town, its name
unknown to Lanyard, where another car, driven inexpertly, rolled out of
a side street and stalled in their path. The emergency brake saved them
a collision; but there were not six inches between the two when the
touring car stopped dead; and minutes were lost before the other got
under way and they were able to proceed.
Less than three hundred yards separated pursued and pursuer as they
raced out through open fields once more. And foot by foot this lead was
being inexorably cut down.
In the seat beside the driver of the grey car a man rose and, steadying
himself by holding onto the windshield, poured out the contents of an
automatic, presumably hoping to puncture the tires of the quarry. A
bullet bored a neat hole through the windshield between the heads of
Liane Delorme and Jules. The woman slipped down upon the floor and
Jules crouched over the wheel. Lanyard fingered his automatic but held
its fire against a moment when he could be more sure of his arm.
Instead, he turned to the lunch hamper and opened it. Liane's
provisioning had been ample for a party thrice their number. In the
bottom of the basket lay six pint bottles of champagne, four of them
unopened. Lanyard took them to the rear seat--and found the grey car
had drawn up to within fifty yards of its prey. Making a pace better
than seventy miles per hour, it would not dare swerve.
The first empty bottle broke to one side, the second squarely between
the front wheels. He grasped the first full bottle by the neck and felt
that its weight promised more accuracy, but ducked before attempting to
throw it as a volley of shots sought to discourage him. At the first
lull he rose and cast the bottle with the overhand action employed in
grenade throwing. It crashed fairly beneath the nearer forward wheel of
the grey car, but without effect, other than to draw another volley in
retaliation. This he risked; the emergency had grown too desperate for
more paltering; the lead had been abridged to thirty yards; in two
minutes more it would be nothing.
The fourth bottle went wild, but the fifth exploded six inches in front
of the offside wheel and its jagged fragments ripped out the heart of
the tire. On the instant of the accompanying blow-out the grey car
shied like a frightened horse and swerved off the road, hurtling
headlong into a clump of trees. The subsequent crash was like the
detonation of a great bomb. Deep shadows masked that tragedy beneath
the trees. Lanyard saw the beam of the headlights lift and drill
perpendicularly into the zenith before it was blacked out.
He turned and yelled in the ear of Jules: "Slow down! Take your time!
They've quit!"
Liane Delorme rose from her cramped position on the floor, and stared
incredulously back along the empty, moonlit road.
"What has become of them?"
Lanyard offered a vague gesture."... tried to climb a tree," he replied
wearily, and dropping back on the rear seat began to worry the cork out
of the last pint bottle of champagne.
He reckoned he had earned a drink if anybody ever had.
XX
THE SYBARITES
Without disclaiming any credit that was rightly his due for making the
performance possible, Lanyard felt obliged to concede that Liane's
Delorme's confidence had been well reposed in the ability of Jules to
drive by the clock. For when the touring car made, on a quayside of
Cherbourg's avant port, what was for its passengers its last stop of
the night, the hour of eight bells was being sounded aboard the
countless vessels that shouldered one another in the twin basins of the
commercial harbour or rode at anchor between its granite jetties and
the distant bulwark of the Digue.
Nor was Jules disposed to deny himself well-earned applause. Receiving
none immediately when he got down from his seat and indulged in one
luxurious stretch, "I'll disseminate the information to the terrestrial
universe," he volunteered, "that was travelling!"
"And now that you have done so," Liane Delorme suggested, "perhaps you
will be good enough to let the stewards know we are waiting."
If the grin was impudent, the salute she got in acknowledgment was
perfection; Jules faced about like a military automaton, strode off
briskly, stopped at some distance to light a cigarette, and in effect
faded out with the flame of the match.
Lanyard didn't try to keep track of his going. Committed as he stood to
follow the lead of Liane Delorme to the end of this chapter of intrigue
(and with his mind at ease as to Monsieur Dupont, for the time being at
least) he was largely indifferent to intervening developments.
He had asked no questions of Liane, and his knowledge of Cherbourg was
limited to a memory of passing through the place as a boy, with a
case-hardened criminal as guide and police at their heels. But assuming
that Liane had booked passages for New York by a Cunarder, a White Star
or American Line Boat--all three touched regularly at Cherbourg, west
bound from Southampton--he expected presently to go aboard a tender and
be ferried out to one of the steamers whose riding lights were to be
seen in the roadstead. Meanwhile he was lazily content....
Mellow voices of bell metal swelled and died on the midnight air while,
lounging against the motor car--with Liane at his side registering more
impatience than he thought the occasion called for--Lanyard listened,
stared, wondered, the breath of the sea sweet in his nostrils, its
flavour in his throat, his vision lost in the tangled web of masts and
cordage and funnels that stencilled the moon-pale sky: the witching
glamour of salt water binding all his senses with its time-old spell.
It was quiet there upon the quay. Somewhere a winch rattled drowsily
and weary tackle whined; more near at hand, funnels were snoring and
pumps chugging with a constant, monotonous noise of splashing. On the
landward side, from wine shops across the way, came blurred gusts of
laughter and the wailing of an accordeon. The footfalls of a watchman,
or perhaps a sergent de ville, had lonely echoes. The high electric
arcs were motionless, and the shadows cast by their steel-blue glare
lay on the pave as if painted in lampblack.
Dupont, the road to Paris, seemed figments of some dream dreamed long
ago...
The tip of a pretty slipper, tapping restlessly, continued to betray
Liane's temper. But she said nothing. Privately Lanyard yawned. Then
Jules, tagged by three men with the fair white jackets and shuffling
gait of stewards, sauntered into view from behind two mountains of
freight, and announced: "All ready, madame." Liane nodded curtly,
lingered to watch the stewards attack the jumble of luggage, saw her
jewel case shouldered, and followed the bearer, Lanyard at her elbow,
Jules remaining with the car.
The steward trotted through winding aisles of bales and crates, turned
a corner, darted up a gangplank to the main-deck of a small steam
vessel, so excessively neat and smart with shining brightwork that
Lanyard thought it one uncommon tender indeed, and surmised a martinet
in command. It seemed curious that there were not more passengers on
the tender's deck; but perhaps he and Liane were among the first to
come aboard; after all, they were not to sail before morning, according
to the women. He apprehended a tedious time of waiting before he gained
his berth. He noticed, too, a life ring lettered SYBARITE, and thought
this an odd name for a vessel of commercial utility. Then he found
himself descending a wide companionway to one of the handsomest saloons
he had ever entered, a living room that, aside from its concessions to
marine architecture, might have graced a residence on Park Lane or on
Fifth avenue in the Sixties.
Lanyard stopped short with his hand on the mahogany handrail.
"I say, Liane! haven't we stumbled into the wrong pew?"
"Wrong pew?" The woman subsided gracefully into a cushioned arm-chair,
crossed her knees, and smiled at his perplexity. "But I do not know
what is that 'wrong pew.'"
"I mean to say... this is no tender, and it unquestionably isn't an
Atlantic liner."
"I should hope not. Did I promise you a--what do you say?--tender or
Atlantic liner? But no: I do not think I told you what sort of vessel
we would sail upon for that America. You did not ask."
"True, little sister. But you might have prepared me. This is a private
yacht."
"Are you disappointed?"
"I won't say that..."
"It is the little ship of a dear friend, monsieur, who generously
permits... But patience! very soon you shall know."
To himself Lanyard commented: "I believe it well!" A door had opened in
the after partition, two men had entered. Above a lank, well-poised
body clothed in the white tunic and trousers of a ship's officer, he
recognised the tragicomic mask of the soi-disant Mr. Whitaker Monk. At
his shoulder shone the bland, intelligent countenance of Mr. Phinuit,
who seemed much at home in the blue serge and white flannels of the
average amateur yachtsman.
From this last Lanyard received a good-natured nod, while Monk, with a
great deal of empressement, proceeded directly to Liane Delorme and
bowed low over the hand which she languidly lifted to be saluted.
"My dear friend!" he said in his sonorous voice. "In another hour I
should have begun to grow anxious about you."
"You would have had good reason, monsieur. It is not two hours since
one has escaped death--and that for the second time in a single day--by
the slenderest margin, and thanks solely to this gentleman here."
Monk consented to see Lanyard, and immediately offered him a profound
salute, which was punctiliously returned. His eyebrows mounted to the
roots of his hair.
"Ah! that good Monsieur Duchemin."
"But no!" Liane laughed. "It is true, the resemblance is striking; I do
not say that, if Paul would consent to grow a beard, it would not be
extraordinary. But--permit me, Captain Monk, to present my brother,
Paul Delorme."
"Your brother, mademoiselle?" The educated eyebrows expressed any
number of emotions. Monk's hand was cordially extended. "But I am
enchanted, Monsieur Delorme, to welcome on board the Sybarite the
brother of your charming sister."
Lanyard resigned limp fingers to his clasp.
"And most public-spirited of you, I'm sure, Captain Monk... I believe I
understood Liane to say Captain Monk?" The captain bowed. "Captain
Whitaker Monk?" Another bow. Lanyard looked to Liane: "Forgive me if I
seem confused, but I thought you told me Mister Whitaker Monk had
sailed for America a week ago."
"And so he did," the captain agreed blandly, while Liane confirmed his
statement with many rapid and emphatic nods. "Mr. Monk, the owner, is
my first cousin. Fortune has been less kind to me in a worldly way;
consequently you see in me merely the skipper of my wealthy kinsman's
yacht."
"And your two names are the same--yours and your cousin's? You're both
Whitaker Monks?"
"It is a favourite name in our family, monsieur."
Lanyard wagged his head in solemn admiration.
Phinuit had come to his side, and was offering his hand in turn.
"It's all gospel, Mr. Lanyard," he declared, with a cheerful
informality which Lanyard found more engaging than Monk's sometimes
laboured mannerisms. "He's sure-enough Captain Whitaker Monk, skipper
of the good ship Sybarite, Mister Whitaker Monk, owner. And my name is
really Phinuit, and I'm honest-to-goodness secretary to Mr. Monk. You
see, the owner got a hurry call from New York, last week, and sailed
from Southampton, leaving us to bring his pretty ship safely home."