“It is so, unhappily.”
“Idiot! Triple idiot! You shall be dismissed, discharged from this hour. You are a disgrace to the force.” M. Floçon raved furiously at his abashed subordinate, blaming him a little too harshly and unfairly, forgetting that until quite recently there had been no strong suspicion against the Italian. We are apt at times to expect others to be intuitively possessed of knowledge that has only come to us at a much later date.
“How was it? Explain. Of course you have been drinking. It is that, or your great gluttony. You were beguiled into some eating-house.”
“Monsieur, you shall hear the exact truth. When we started more than an hour ago, our fiacre took the usual route, by the Quais and along the riverside. My gentleman made himself most pleasant.”
“No doubt,” growled the Chief.
“Offered me an excellent cigar, and talked—not about the affair, you understand—but of Paris, the theatres, the races, Longchamps, Auteuil, the grand restaurants. He knew everything, all Paris, like his pocket. I was much surprised, but he told me his business often brought him here. He had been employed to follow up several great Italian criminals, and had made a number of important arrests in Paris.”
“Get on, get on! come to the essential.”
“Well, in the middle of the journey, when we were about the Pont Henri Quatre, he said, ‘Figure to yourself, my friend, that it is now near noon, that nothing has passed my lips since before daylight at Laroche. What say you? Could you eat a mouthful, just a scrap on the thumb-nail? Could you?’”
“And you—greedy, gormandizing beast!—you agreed?”
“My faith, monsieur, I too was hungry. It was my regular hour. Well—at any rate, for my sins I accepted. We entered the first restaurant, that of the ‘Reunited Friends,’ you know it, perhaps, monsieur? A good house, especially noted for tripe à la mode de Caen.” In spite of his anguish, Block smacked his fat lips at the thought of this most succulent but very greasy dish.