But Jim was not satisfied. It was a real collaboration which Hanaud had appeared a few minutes ago not merely to accept, but even to look forward to. Now, on the contrary, he was evading it.
"But if we are to work together?" Jim suggested.
"You might want to reach me quickly," Hanaud continued. "Yes. And I might want to reach you, if not so quickly, still very secretly. Yes." He turned the question over in his mind. "You will stay at the Maison Crenelle, I suppose?"
"No," said Jim, and he drew a little comfort from Hanaud's little start of disappointment. "There will be no need for that," he explained. "Boris Waberski can attempt nothing more. Those two girls will be safe enough."
"That's true," Hanaud agreed. "You will go, then, to the big hotel in the Place Darcy. For me I shall stay in one that is more obscure, and not under my own name. Whatever chance of secrecy is still left for me, that I shall cling to."
He did not volunteer the name of the obscure hotel or the name under which he proposed to masquerade, and Jim was careful not to inquire. Hanaud stood with his hand upon the knob of the door and his eyes thoughtfully resting upon Frobisher's face.
"I will trust you with a little trick of mine," he said, and a smile warmed and lit his face to good humour. "Do you like the pictures? No—yes? For me, I adore them. Wherever I go I snatch an hour for the cinema. I behold wonderful things and I behold them in the dark—so that while I watch I can talk quietly with a friend, and when the lights go up we are both gone, and only our empty bocks are left to show where we were sitting. The cinemas—yes! With their audiences which constantly change and new people coming in who sit plump down upon your lap because they cannot see an inch beyond their noses, the cinemas are useful, I tell you. But you will not betray my little secret?"
He ended with a laugh. Jim Frobisher's spirits were quite revived by this renewal of Hanaud's confidence. He felt with a curious elation that he had travelled a long way from the sedate dignities of Russell Square. He could not project in his mind any picture of Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt meeting a client in a dark corner of a cinema theatre off the Marylebone Road. Such manoeuvres were not amongst the firm's methods, and Jim began to find the change exhilarating. Perhaps, after all, Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt were a little musty, he reflected. They missed—and he coined a phrase, he, Jim Frobisher! ... they missed the ozone of police-work.
"Of course I'll keep your secret," he said with a thrill in his voice. "I should never have thought of so capital a meeting-place."
"Good," said Hanaud. "Then at nine o'clock each night, unless there is something serious to prevent me, I shall be sitting in the big hall of the Grande Taverne. The Grande Taverne is at the corner across the square from the railway station. You can't mistake it. I shall be on the left-hand side of the hall and close up to the screen and at the edge near the billiard-room. Don't look for me when the lights are raised, and if I am talking to any one else, you will avoid me like poison. Is that understood?"